The Portuguese textbook and the work with writing production: Analysis of proposals of textual rewriting

Abstract

This paper intends to investigate if the rewriting proposals presented in a Portuguese textbook include satisfactorily the language operations that constitute the communicative action. The colection selected as material for analysis is Delmanto and Castro’s textbook Português: ideias e linguagens, designed to the second stage of Elementary School, from which all the rewriting proposals are investigated. This work is based on Social-Discursive Interactionism (SDI), as proposed by Bronckart (1999, 2006) and on Applied Linguistics: from the former the considerations about the (re)writing and its teaching are withdrawn from; from the latter, the conceptions related to the communicative action and to the language operations necessary to its realization. The analysis shows that, in general, the textual rewriting is an activity presented in more than 60% of the proposals of textual writing and that, among these, a little bit more than 50% include the language operations described by Bronckart. The other ones give priority to criteria considered unproductive to the acquisition of writing strategies by students. We conclude, thereby, that the Portuguese textbook analysed already considers that the rewriting is important to the appropriation of production strategies; however, there are still many difficulties in choosing the most signifi cant criteria for that.

Key words: textual rewriting, Portuguese textbook, language capacities.